Pilgrimage to Mecca

We leave the Painted Canyon parking area, retracing our tracks back along the dirt road until we reach Box Canyon Road and turn in the direction of Indio. Our plans are to ferret out the adobe house that we lived in nearly 54 years ago.

In 1956, I lived with my parents in a tiny adobe cottage, adjoining a date orchard in Mecca, California. Mecca is just a few miles north of the Salton Sea, and light years away from Palm Spring which lies just 25 miles further north. My brief 5 or 6 month residency in Mecca made a significant impression on my life. I am an only child and my father was mapping this particular area of the San Andreas Fault. My parents enrolled me in the Mecca kindergarten. My sour, sharp featured teacher was crotchety; my classmates spoke no English, and I spoke no Spanish. Our classroom was utter chaos and I had no friends at school. Happily, the school day is short and at noon, my mother would pick me up and we would drive along the irrigation canal back to our tiny cottage. My father was in field all day and my mother would allow me to play outside of our adobe house. I was soon venturing further and further from our dusty front yard, ferreting out desert creatures and building nests in scraggly trees where I could hide away and day dream. When my father would return from the field, he often had a surprise for me. It was often a horned lizard or a snake tucked inside his lunch box. On one or two occasions he brought home a desert tortoise, and subsequently drilled a hole in the back flange of the tortoises shell so that we could tether our captive by a chain to the small tree outside of our cottage. The tortoises would plod endlessly around in a circle, wearing a deep rut in the dirt. I remember many hot and slow afternoons when I would lie on the ground feeding them iceberg lettuce. My father had many small clear plastic specimen boxes among his geological research equipment. To my mothers’ horror, I would occasionally "borrow" one of his plastic hinged boxes and lie and wait in the dirt for the unsuspecting scorpion. I could corral the sand colored scorpion under one half of the box and quickly snap it shut, thus capturing my new pet for careful inspection, both top and bottom. So….for those of you who ask: “Why inspires you to create the pieces that you do?” Much of who I am and what I create was nurtured by scientific parents in a desert landscape. Consider that dragons are not a far stretch from lizards…just add wings and stir your imagination.

I made one very special friend during this time; Maria. She was my age, 5 or 6 years old and lived in an outdoor encampment in the date orchard adjoining our simple adobe cottage. We didn't speak the same language, but happily played together, with Jenny Dolls on the shaded and dusty front porch of our tiny cottage. On several occasions, Marias' father would invite me to walk with him and Maria to the nearest grocery store and he would buy us popsicles. On this road trip, I found that same corner store; much changed in 54 years, but I have no doubt that it is where Maria and I ate popsicles together on scorching afternoons in 1956.